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Facebook Shuts Down The 'Friend List Feed', But Keeps The Friend List Feature

In an announcement, the social giant Facebook said that it's shutting down its Friend List Feeds.

The feature allowed users to create a much more personalized version of Facebook. So instead of just muting them, for example, users could create a whole new experience on the News Feed where only updates that are important to them are shown, with less clutters from those other 'friends' that they don't really care about.

The feature made things easier for users to see what's relevant, but first, they are required to create a friend list.

Here, Facebook is shutting the down the Friend List Feed, but keeps the friend list.

"Don’t worry — you can still continue to create, edit and share to your friend lists," said Facebook. What's gone is only the Friend List Feeds, which is essentially a separate News Feed within the Facebook app.

Originally, the friend list feature has been around for years, but required some manual labor that can be daunting to some: users need to create a list, title it, then go to through all of their friends to determine who to add.

The feature never really took off, as Facebook once said in 2011 that 95 percent of users hadn't made any list.

This is why Facebook made the feature a lot simpler, by launching 'Smarts Lists'. This allows users to group their friends automatically, saving the effort. The social media has even customized the Smart Lists so it could identify some common factors based on profile data. This way, users could use the Facebook-created list for better selective sharing, without having to build the list themselves.

But still, the addition of Smart Lists didn't make people use the Friend List Feeds feature. Most even never knew the feature existed.

For this reason, Facebook said that Friend List Feed is shutting down on August 9, 2018.

"We’re shutting down this lesser-used feature to focus our efforts on improving the main News Feed experience. While people won’t be able to view custom feeds from lists of friends, they’ll still be able to create and edit friends lists, and share just to these audiences whenever they post to Facebook. In addition to these options, they can also keep customizing News Feed by visiting News Feed preferences to choose which posts they want to see first, or hide posts they don’t want to see."

With the Friend List Feed feature gone, users can customize their News Feed by going to the News Feed Preferences section to see posts those people and Pages they care on the top.